The following poem, The Mill- Wheel, has a certain charm, seldom lacking in Mr. Benson's verse, but illustrates at the same time the purposelessness which is its besetting weakness:

Turn, mill-wheel, solemnly turn,

Under the gable fringed with fern ;
Run, swift freshet, steadily run,
Filling the black lips one by one;

Toss and gurgle thy waters cool,
Ere thou splash in the moss-lined pool;
Hark how the loud gear sullenly groans,
Whirling, whirling the patient stones!

Haste thee, rivulet, haste away,

All that we ask thou hast done to-day ;
Cease, O streamlet, thy chiding sound,
Hence! forget thou wast ever bound;

Leap and linger with fitful gleam,
Till thou plunge in the brimming stream;
Thine to wander, and thine to be
Merged at length in the monstrous sea.

Only forget not, there at play,

How in the valley, day by day,

Under the gable fringed with ferns,

Black and solemn the mill-wheel turns!

We read this with a general sense of pleasure, but, having read it, we feel that the mill-wheel of our intelligence has been, as Stevenson says, "grinding no grist." Its beauty of sound is not remarkable; it is not very vividly descriptive; and its idea is, to say the least of it, elusive. Is it quite worth while to apostrophise a mill-race and beg its waters, when they reach the sea, not to forget the mill-wheel in the valley? They certainly will forget it, and why should they not? Is there any esoteric and spiritual significance in the poet's appeal to the water's non-existent memory? I think not; I think he was, so to speak, merely “making conversation," poetic small-talk; and too much of Mr. Benson's work partakes of this character.

Among his cradle-gifts, the instinct of experiment seems to have been omitted. He makes no effort to get out of the placidly reflective groove to which, I think, it is his lack of initiative, rather than any deeper disability, that confines him. Hence the undeniable monotony of his work. He is always brooding; sometimes half humorously, sometimes mournfully, sometimes querulously; and his broodings are almost always upon personal or purely abstract topics. The life of the nation, of the world, of the struggling and agonising individual soul, loving, hating and aspiring, find scarcely an echo in his verse. We feel that he could if he would shake off the obsession of this listless, cultured melancholy, and apply his very considerable gifts to the treatment of larger and more vital subjects. In his three books, for example, there are two poems and two only -Lord Vyet and The Robin and the Credence-which are something in the nature of ballads. Though not of striking merit, they are far from bad; if he cared to work this vein a little further, he might find it full of golden possibilities. But this is only one experiment out of a score which would be worth attempting, and from all of which he sedulously abstains. It would be something if he even achieved a fine failure; but I see no reason why he should despair of success.

Of the memorable passages scattered throughout his work, I cull a few at random. Already in the dedication of his first volume, To my Father, we come across a noteworthy verse of thanks for the time

When thou, through glad laborious days,

Didst nurse and kindle generous fires,

That, as the old earth forward runs,

May fit the sons of hero sires,

To be the sires of hero sons.

There is a sense of clean, firm fingering in these lines, a

master- touch on the keyboard. Very vigorous, too, are these opening stanzas of By the Glacier:

Crawl on, old ice-worm, from the solemn hills;

Press deep thy burrowing snout among the stones,
Mutter and murmur with thy turbid rills,

And crush the old Earth's bones.

Gnaw, grind the patient cliffs with ravenous teeth,
The crumbling crag shall feed thy snaky spine,
The dim unfathomed caverns gape beneath
Azure and crystalline.

Metrically, to my thinking, a poem entitled My Friend is one of Mr. Benson's happiest inspirations. I quote the last three stanzas:

What lies here on the bed?

What is this pinched white thing,

With a stony eye and a lip that's dry?
See I drive from the stiffened head,

Yon fly with the buzzing wing;

Presently when I am fled,

He will return and bring

Nay, but I do him wrong,

Nothing of him I see,

Save the shrouding dusk, the chrysalis husk,

Oh but we loved it, we!
He is serene and strong,
Hath he a thought of me
Under the angels' song?

If it be well with him,

If it be well, I say,

I will not try with a childish cry

To draw him thence away:

Only my day is dim,

Only I long for him,

Where is my friend to-day?

Mr. Benson rarely essays blank verse, but he writes it well.

In the Iron Cage, a description of an imprisoned eagle, is too

long to be quoted entire. These five opening lines strike me as singularly strong and beautiful :

The saddest sight! oh, there are sights and sounds

And thoughts enough in this brief world of ours

To wet with tears the stony face of Time,

Who has seen the suns flame out, the mountains piled,

And guesses at the vast designs of God.

More than once Mr. Benson has described very graphically the sensation of speeding through an English landscape in a railway train. For example:

Through this bleak hour that brings the dark

Ere daylight fade,

We fly on iron wheels, and mark

The changing glade.

Northward the shuddering axles reel

With merry din;

Like moving spokes on some slow wheel
The furrows spin.

The copse, the farmstead shifts; and both
Fly like the wind.

Swift runs the distant spire, as loth
To lag behind.

This poem, entitled Northwards, occurs in Mr. Benson's first book; in his last, we find a piece entitled The Railway, of which I quote the last four stanzas:

But best of all, when, in the sullen night,
Along the dim embankment, hung in air,
Shoots the red streamer, linked with cheerful light;
The wide-flung furnace-glare

Lights the dim hedges and the rolling steam :

Then passes, and in narrowing distance dies,
Tracked by the watchful lanterns' lessening gleam-
Two red resentful eyes.

And some are borne to dim and alien shores,

And some return to merriment and home :

These, while the train through slumbering homestead roars
Thrill with delight:-and some

Fly from the horror that their hands have wrought,
And shudder, as the shivering engine reels;
They fly, but falter: one red-throated thought
Pants ever at their heels.

This final stanza is really admirable, an imaginative inspiration. Mr. Benson has done nothing finer.

A little further on in the same book there occurs a poem, remarkable in conception rather than execution, entitled The Artist in Church. The last three stanzas will indicate its drift:

Lo, in our eyes the tear-drops start,

We swim in stormy seas:

Hast Thou within Thine ample heart,
No shelter for the sons of art,

No room for such as these?

Or wert Thou silent of design,
Because Thy thought was cold?
Doth love of word, of hue, of line,
Sequester from Thy power divine,
Dissociate from Thy fold?

O words of Power, O gracious deeds!
When Thou didst dwell with men,
Thou didst divine their deepest needs:
I marvel, and my spirit bleeds

That Thou wast silent then.

The reason why Jesus had nothing to say to plastic and pictorial artists is, of course, obvious enough: Judaism banned the making of images, and Jesus never came in contact with either the art or the artists of Greece and Rome. He was too intent on a moral and spiritual revolution to give any thought to æsthetics, which nowhere thrust themselves on his attention. Still, it is curious to speculate how different the gospels and the world might have been had the Jews happened to be an artistic people, or had Jesus himself gone forth into the porticos and forums of the Gentiles. Mr. Benson suggests this speculation; why should he not elaborate it?